The house had come to him in a series of hearings, a mess of probate rigamarole he was barely involved in. For a moment, he felt proud of the generous tip he’d given the cabby, but the feeling evaporated as he walked across the patchy lawn. The years at this address were a rollercoaster, and in the same breath, Hubert remembered raucus watergun fights with the neighborhood hooligans, huddling in the snow while his mother’s screams rattled the storm windows. Playing catch on one afternoon, a black eye and broken ribs on another.
When Hester passed, things got much worse.
Hubert’s thoughts fell to his sister as he traversed the damaged pavement of the front walk, long weeds brushing against his pantlegs. If she were in this position, he knew she wouldn’t have come back. Her defiance defined her up to her dying breath.
Hester had been his protector, a sandy haired teenager with rage in her belly and little patience for her parents’ violence. It took the rest of family eight months to leave after her body was found in the driveway, and from then on, no one else moved in.
Peeling paint and sagging eaves showed two decades of neglect. Boarded windows and a rotting porch. The handrail was rusted and wobbly, and the first stair whined in agony, flexing under the weight of Hubert’s hesitant foot. With a sigh, he climbed the steps to the disheveled memento mori.
Surprisingly, the lock worked on the first turn, and inside, the house was a mausoleum. Sheet covered couches sat exactly where they’d left them, bits of broken glass from the last day there still littering the hardwood of the living room floor. Each room was a time capsule of escape, some delicately prepared, others left hastily with cabinets flung open and half-packed suitcases on the bed. Other than the dust, everything remained untouched.
As Hubert climbed the stairs to the second floor, his heart was pounding. The hallway creaked beneath him as he approached Hester’s room, his head filled with ricocheting memories. Late nights playing board games or laughing joyfully at the comics stolen from the neighbor’s newspaper, pressing their backs against the door as the house echoed with the barrage of their father’s fists against the other side.
Hubert took a deep breath and entered the room, illuminated only by thin bands of sunlight creeping around the edges of the particle board nailed to the window frame. He knelt next to an empty bookshelf – they’d gotten rid of Hester’s things first – and extracted a claw hammer he knew would be there.
The boards came off easily, and the tomb of a bedroom was filled with sunbeams. Disturbed dust motes glided gracefully through the bands of light pouring through the dirty windows. Hubert coughed and began and counting the vertical slats of paneling on the wall. When he got to sixteen, he stopped, gently pressing the claws of the hammer into the top of the panel. Sixteen, Hester’s lucky number. Her birthday. The age she was when she died.
Hubert pulled back the panel, and tears welled in his eyes as he plucked a folded scrap of paper from behind it. He left Hester’s thin necklace hidden in place as the paneling snapped back against the wall. A few light taps of the hammer again concealed the tiny compartment. He unfolded the note and began to read, though he already knew what it said. The letter, started by Hester and finished by Hubert nearly a year later, was addressed to anyone who would listen.
He’d forgotten the odd swells of his sister’s penmanship, but immediately recognized the juvenile rendition of his own. Hester’s portion described her intent, her plan to take her brother away from that awful place, by force if necessary. Hubert’s additions were a series of singular accounts, each dated. The first, scrawled in the traumatized, shaky handwriting of an eleven year old boy, made him avert his eyes.
“October 6: They killed Hester right in front of the house. It’s 4am. Mom and dad found out we were leaving tomorrow. No one’s coming to help.”
The last entry, marked June of the following year, was the longest.
“They won’t tell me anything. They made me pack a bag but I don’t think I’m going with them. They’ve been packing boxes all week. I can hear them yelling at each other downstairs. A man was here asking about Hester again. I’m afraid. I hope the next family finds this.”
In the bottom corner, with barely any room to spare, he had signed.
“Hubert Rose, age 12”
He read the page up and down, fighting back the sobs that frantically tried to escape his chest, and when he could no longer bear reliving the memories, he refolded the paper and ran from the room. As Hubert bounded down the stairs, the carpeted wood fractured beneath each pounding footfall. The banister splintered and fell away from the staircase, the entire flight collapsing on itself just as he reached the bottom. For the first time in a long time, he laughed. The demolition crew would be there within the week.
He strode across the rotten porch with renewed confidence, and trotted down the steps without glancing back at the house. Hubert took ten steps across the tattered lawn, through patches of dirt that had once been an action figure graveyard, and approached the dented garage door. In the driveway, standing just where Hester had lain bleeding so many years before, he dropped the hammer among dandelions sprouting through cracks in the concrete.
The letter safely folded in his shirt pocket, Hubert walked away from the house for truly the last time, finally holding proof of the truth he should have been telling for twenty years.